SEO Tips for Your Indiana Business
Search Engine Optimization — You’ve heard of it, but the explanation starts sounding like Greek after a few sentences. Fortunately, there are a few quick tips to help you maximize your website’s search engine rankings. This means more visitors, more clicks, and more customers, and ensures you’ll be riding the SEO Speedwagon (sorry).
Google and other search engines like to provide quality content and sites for their users, and the best way to get Google to be your buddy is to make a helpful, well-designed website. Certain web design firms can definitely help you with that, but there are a handful of items to focus on to be sure you’re making the most of your website.
Headlines and Titles: If you quickly glance over a website, your eye will probably pull out the largest, boldest bits of information first. More than likely, that information is going to be in the page’s large headlines and titles. To help visitors and Google figure out what your website is all about, place your most important site keywords in the page headlines and title tags. If you’re a carpet cleaner in Pierceton, IN, for instance, be sure that “Carpet Cleaning” and “Pierceton, IN” appear in your page’s main headlines.
It’s All About Your Image: Images can make your site infinitely more visually appealing, but sadly search engines can’t do much with them. Images can’t be “read” like text can, and therefore Google doesn’t know what it’s looking at when it visits your site. However, with the use of “alt” tags in each image, you can verbally describe to search engines what the image is all about. Check with a web developer or your designer for a bit of help with alt tags.
Links, Links, Links: Beyond having a great website, one way Google determines how to “trust” your website (and therefore send more visitors to it) is based on the number of links back to your site elsewhere on the internet. If people have found your site valuable, maybe they’ll link to it on their own site or blog. Search engines use these links to determine how valuable your site is — the more links (generally), the more people have found your site to be useful. Ask friends and business partners to create links to your site, or ask for a link to your page on the site of a trade organization or network that you belong to.
Quality SEO requires time and maintenance. If some of these tips might be over your head (or a bit more time-consuming than you’d like), we’re here to help out. Contact us today!
SEO aims your site's focus to capture new business
It’s a problem that we encounter time and time again when chatting with small businesses: They’ve created a bargain website through another service provider, and were promised the world. But after the dust settles, there’s one nagging problem — No one can actually find their website. Read the rest of this entry »
Warsaw, Indiana's Courthouse
Nothing excites me more than making that initial contact with a new client — Hearing about their business, learning about their goals for a new site, and developing a plan on how we can help achieve those goals.
While we’ve worked with clients across the country, working with folks right here in Warsaw, Indiana is really a treat. It’s fantastic to make connections with neighbors and friends, and really help their business or organization take shape right here in our hometown.
One thing I’ve heard a handful of times in these initial client meetings is a bit of shock in discovering there is a progressive, cutting-edge web design company here in small town Warsaw, Indiana. Well, we’re happy to prove them wrong, of course! The small town atmosphere sometimes fools folks into thinking that they have to look elsewhere for quality web and graphic design.
However, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the best and brightest designers and programmers that Warsaw has to offer, and our talent rivals anything found in a bigger city or at an expensive agency. With the draw of the local orthopedic industry, Warsaw can attract a number of highly skilled and motivated folks — and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with many of them here at RipFish Interactive.
So, the next time you write off Warsaw as a tech laggard, why not give us a shout?
Many of our clients come to us looking for someone to help them update their aging website. Often, they just want to make some simple changes on a weekly basis, but are sick and tired of playing the waiting game with their current web company. When the changes do finally get made, they end up costing them an arm in a leg in the process.
That’s where Content Management Systems come in — Rather than tell someone else to make the changes (at a hefty hourly rate, usually), you can make them yourself without knowing the first thing about programming or web sites. Got weekly specials and coupons to update? Want to keep your customers updated with regular blog posts and links? Want to highlight new or featured products on your homepage? It’s as easy as editing a Word document when your website is built using a CMS.
As Spiderman taught us, great power comes with great responsibility, and sometimes all the flexibility and options involved in modern-day CMS can be a bit overwhelming. What good is the simplicity of updating your website with a CMS if the CMS is just as hard to learn as the programming?
That’s where WordPress comes in. WordPress is an highly powerful and expandable CMS that has one major benefit over it’s competitors: It’s actually easy to use. 90% of the websites RipFish creates are built on the WordPress CMS, and our clients are thrilled with it. No extraneous options or buttons, and a very short learning curve make WordPress our choice for website development.
Want more information on how a WordPress-based website could help out your business? Just drop us a line!
RipFish launches its new web site November 15, 2009. Check out our expanded portfolio, our new capabilities, and shoot us a message with any questions.
